Physics

Scientists with the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission may have had a scare when the Philae lander bounced off of the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, but the bumpy touchdown actually had a silver lining: It allowed them to take measurements in two separate spots instead of one. Now, in a suite of papers published in the journal Science, Philae researchers have started to sketch out the comet’s physical and chemical profile -- that one spot is covered in fluffy, clumpy sediments while another is caked in a hard crust; that the comet’s head is porous but fairly uniform in composition; and that there are a number of organic molecules, including four that...

Related "Physics" Articles

Scientists with the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission may have had a scare when the Philae lander bounced off of the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, but the bumpy touchdown actually had a silver lining: It allowed them to take...

Mysterious molecules floating through interstellar space have been siphoning away shards of the starlight that reaches Earth, and scientists have long tried — and failed — to identify the culprits.
Now researchers say they may have found some of the...

In early 1946, half a year after atomic bombs devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. government awarded Ernest Lawrence the Medal for Merit. Presiding over the ceremony was Gen. Leslie Groves, military commander of the Manhattan Project, for which...

For decades, physicists have looked for the pentaquark -- a type of subatomic particle long theorized to exist but never seen, despite numerous false alarms.
This week, scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, announced...

It's official: New Horizons has survived its close flyby of the Pluto system unscathed.
“We have a healthy spacecraft, we have a healthy system, and we are outbound for Pluto,” Alice Bowman, mission operations manager for New Horizons, said Tuesday night...

Pioneering physicist Ernest O. Lawrence transformed American science over nearly three decades. The inventor of the cyclotron, the ancestor of such advanced machines as Europe's Large Hadron Collider, Lawrence placed UC Berkeley in the forefront of...

In his latest TV turn, John Benjamin Hickey plays the professor enlisted to help build the first atomic bomb in Los Alamos, N.M.
The 51-year-old actor stars as lead scientist Frank Winter on "Manhattan," the 1940s-set drama on WGN America...

A team of astronomers peering deep into the heavens has discovered the earliest, most distant galaxy yet, spotted just 670 million years after the big bang.The findings, described this week in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, reveal a surprisingly...

One of the greatest mysteries of how stars behave has been right in our own backyard: the sun’s corona. Scientists have long wondered what heats this thin, ethereal shell of particles to roughly 300 times the temperature of the surface of the sun itself....

Scientists have created an atomic clock so precise that it won't lose or gain a single second in 15 billion years -- roughly the age of our universe.
But the clock isn't just steady, it's also amazingly accurate. So accurate in fact, that it can detect...

Our solar system may not be as special as we thought. A new study of a young star’s protoplanetary disk finds the same kinds of complex organic molecules that are found on the comets in our own solar system.
The findings, published in the journal Nature,...

After a two-year hiatus, the giant proton-smasher that discovered the Higgs boson is back in action – and ready for bigger challenges. Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, successfully sent two...

The world's biggest particle accelerator is back in action after a two-year shutdown and upgrade, embarking on a new mission that scientists hope could give them a look into the unseen dark universe.
Scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear...

Leaders of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency were effusive about the new technology.
It was the most powerful radar of its kind in the world, they told Congress. So powerful it could detect a baseball over San Francisco from the other side of the country....

A month after Charles Munger Jr. wrote his first $100,000 check to a political campaign, he got a taste of the chronic rejection familiar to California's big Republican donors: The 2005 ballot measure he backed lost by a landslide.
Yet Munger, the son of...

Matthew Kleban holds a doctorate in physics from Stanford, conducted postdoctorate research at Albert Einstein's alma mater the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and is now part of the research group at NYU's Center for Cosmology and Particle...

Dark matter just got a shade more mysterious. Scientists studying a smashup between giant clusters of galaxies have watched how each cluster’s dark matter passes through the collision – and found that it seems to contradict certain theories of how dark...

The Large Hadron Collider is getting back in business. After a two-year hiatus, the giant proton-smashing machine that brought you the discovery of the Higgs boson is set to take scientists’ experiments to nearly double its previous energy limit, in the...

Scientists studying chameleon skin have discovered the secret to the lizards' color-changing prowess: Rather than relying purely on pigments, the animals use photonic nanocrystals in their skin to manipulate light with exquisite precision.
The...

Physicist Val Fitch was not a lawbreaker, but he is famous for broken laws.
In a classic 1960s series of experiments, Fitch and his Princeton University colleague James Cronin proved that one of the key laws of physics hitherto thought immutable — that...